Interaction and the Conservation of Gender Inequality: Considering Employment

“For example, Gutek and Morasch (1982) argued that gender roles spill over into the workplace, and Ridgeway (1997) maintained that gender provides an “implicit, background identity” (p. 231) in the workplace.”

“While Ridgeway (1997) and Tilly (1998) make important strides in specifying the cognitive and social mechanisms involved in gender boundary-work, similar analyses are needed concerning cultural narratives that play a crucial role in the reproduction of gender boundaries [along the lines developed…”

“…from stereotypes associated with underrepresented groups in a particular occupational context, implicit status differences between demographic groups may also be a mechanism by which contextual factors such as occupational demography filter into team-level interactions (see Ridgeway, 1991, 1997).”

“While empirical support for actual gender differences in mathematical competence is weak (Baker and Jones 1993; Finn 1980; Harnisch 1984; Hyde et al. 1990), the belief of male mathematical superiority itself is widely dispersed in American culture.”

“…in same-sex settings, ongoing events in the workplace may trigger gender associations among participants, leading them over time to collectively construe their task (e.g., selling securities) in gender-typed terms even when it was not initially gender-linked by the larger culture (Ridgeway, 1997).”

“…that local cultures can trigger individual cognitive and interactional biases against low-status groups and that the processes of evaluation themselves are infl uenced by the cultural context in which individuals interact (Ridgeway, 1997; Correll and Ridgeway, 2003; Lamont, 2009; Turco, 2010).”

“Thus, interaction plays an important role in sustaining or modifying the gender system as a whole in the face of continually changing material and social structural conditions (Ridgeway 1997).”

“…field-based literature on employer evaluation bias (e.g., Mobley 1982; Tsui and Gutek 1984; Pulakos et al. 1989) and even biased self-assessments (Ridgeway 1997; Correll 2001).7 Individual-level accounts, common in early psychological and organizational behavior studies, argue that, for various…”

“Gender scholars, I am happy to say, were in the vanguard of this development (for example Acker 1992; Connell 1987; Lorber 1994; Reskin 1988; Ridgeway 1997; Risman 1998).”

“be seen as a punitive means of “doing gender”: defining, enacting, and enforcing masculinity in men and femininity in women with everyday social practices (cf. Burgess & Borgida, 1999; Ely & Meyerson, 2000; Padavic & Reskin, 2002; Ridgeway, 1997; West & Zimmerman, 1987).”

“…concerning occupational gender-typing and underlying schemas predicts that people often hold unconscious biases about the gender of the archetypical employee in a particular occupation or industry (White et al., 1989; Ridgeway, 1997, 2011; Williams, 2000: ch. 3; Gorman, 2005; Heilman, 2012).”

“A large literature exists on the reproduction of gender in interactions in organizations (see Reskin, 2003; Ridgeway, 1997).”

“The interactional arena, in particular, has garnered a great deal of scholarly attention as a crucial site in which such negotiations occur (Ridgeway, 1997; Ridgeway & Correll, 2000; West & Zimmerman, 1987).”

“…show groupbased inequality in several domains of everyday life—healthcare, housing, education, employment, and the justice system (Badgett, 1996; Daniels, 2001; Ellis and Riggle, 1996; Leonhardt, 2002; Portwood, 1995; Raudenbush and Kasim, 1998; Ridgeway, 1997; Rubenstein, 1996; Stohlberg, 2002).”

“…simulations of the diffusion processes have shown that if people form and spread status beliefs in local intercategory encounters as the theory argues, then nearly consensual status beliefs would indeed be a logical outcome under many social structural conditions (Ridgeway and Balkwell 1997).”

“Since people bring their beliefs about gender into social relations with little thought, gendered performance is pervasive and taken for granted (Ridgeway, 1997).”

“…across jobs and ranks in organizations and have argued that homophily tends to subtly reinforce social stratification by providing more beneficial social capital to members of majority groups (Baron et al. 1986, Bielby and Baron 1986, Ibarra 1993, Ridgeway 1997, McGuire 2002, Singh et al. 2010).”

“Research supported by The National Science Foundation grants SES-0216424 and SES-0216843. and promotions (Kmec 2003a; Petersen and Morgan 1995; Tomaskovic-Devey 1993) as well as with the cementing of status expectations and distinctions (Ridgeway 1997; Tilly 1998).”

“Several gender theorists point to the level of interactions and exchanges as perhaps the least studied and most potentially informative area of research on gender inequality (Deutsch, 2007; Ridgeway, 1997; Risman, 2004).”

“Not only are gendered beliefs and organizational context influenced and reinforced (or challenged) by interactions (Ridgeway 1997; Martin 2003), but gender itself is created and re-created through interaction (West and Zimmerman 1987).”

“According to status characteristics theory (Berger et al., 1972; Ridgeway, 1997), people engage in an unconscious process socio-cognitive stereotyping, which involves labeling and categorizing others based on personal characteristics such as gender and race.”

“Identities based on gender affect the basic rules that people use to frame interaction [40,66]; the fact that gender can emerge in person, role, and social (or group) identities shows how powerful perceptions of gender are [67]:”

“Ridgeway and her colleagues (Ridgeway, 1991, 1997, 2001, 2011; Ridgeway and Correll, 2004) show convincingly that the status expectations attached to gender and race categories are crosssituational.”

“The fact that the interviewing process seems to produce the largest boost in the percentage of women is consistent with the idea that it is the interaction with the candidate that seems to activate the stereotypical conception of gender (Correll 2001, 2004; Ridgeway 1997).”

“We agree with Ridgeway (1997) that gender and gender devaluation are interactional accomplishments and so must take place in concrete social settings (i.e., the workplaces where labor processes are negotiated, wages are set, and people allocated to jobs).”

“The presence of more women and people of color at managerial levels should assure more equal access to resources (Ridgeway, 1997), but in organizations with low representations of female or ethnic minority man agers, organizational hierarchies accentuate status differences (Wharton, 1992).”

“Drawing attention to such moments highlights gender (rather than allowing it to fade into the background), which at the same time activates a host of negative status beliefs about femininity (Ridgeway 1997, 2008, 2011; Ridgeway and Correll 2004).”

“…increases the relevance of group-level research on the emergence and persistence of gender hierarchies (Berger, Rosenholtz, and Zelditch, 1980; Ridgeway, 1997; Lucas, 2003; Troyer, 2004) because small firms are closest to the laboratory groups in which the replication of routines and gender…”

“Just as the way people evaluate men and women varies based on the structure of the task at hand (see Ridgeway 1997), we argue that the design of tools used to assess merit—or what we term the architecture of evaluation—can influence the degree to which gender stereotypes are expressed in…”

“We believe the key mechanism explaining gender inequalities in naturally occurring groups is the “mediating interactional mechanism” proposed by Ridgeway (1997).”

“The monopolization of opportunities by groups of higher status at the expense of other groups, a phenomenon identified by Weber (1978) and called closure by sociologists (Parkin 1974, Murphy 1988), is an important hurdle to developing intergroup cooperation.”

“Whatever is gendered ‘feminine’ tends to be devalued; whatever is gendered ‘masculine’ receives higher status, and is perceived as more professional and as representing competence (Heilman, 2001; Ridgeway, 1997).”

“See also Connell (1987), Chafetz (1988), Epstein (1988), Ridgeway (1997), and Bourdieu (2001) on the relationship between gender roles and male dominance.”

“…towards recognising gender as a multi-level system of disadvantage which includes: at a macro-level, socio-economic disadvantages and cultural norms; at a meso-level, interactional practises within social institutions; and at a micro-level, internalised traits and identities (Ridgeway, 1997, 2014).”

“…from a number of perspectives, including socialization and role development (Eagly & Karau, 2002), the development of gender-related social status (Ridgeway, 1997; Ridgeway & Balkwell, 1997), and cognitive processes related to social categorization (Heilman, Block, Martell, & Simon, 1989; Lord &…”

“Research (Ridgeway 1997) suggests that people are more likely to rely on gender stereotypes when more salient information is unavailable, suggesting that stereotypes may be most activated with weak ties, about whom information holders may know little, and in occupations with no specific training…”

“In contrast, cultural explanations point out the importance of socially shared stereotypes about male and female traits and skills (Charles and Bradley, 2009), which are internalized during childhood and reproduced by everyday interactions between (adult) women and men (Ridgeway, 1997).”